THEREFORE REPENT!

Jim Monroe’s graphic novel, drawn by Salgood Sam (which may be Maxim Douglas backwards) takes its title, Therefore Repent!, from Revelations 2:16: “Therefore Repent! If you do not, I will come to you soon and fight against them with the sword of my mouth” — an utterance as ambiguous in meaning as the book and therefore appropriate. In this tale, a man dressed as a mummy and his girlfriend, who wears a bird’s head from the shoulders up, have a dog that suddenly starts talking. They are among the survivors — those “left behind” to employ the parlance — after the Rapture (the “Big Snatch”) has taken into Heaven all worthy souls, leaving us sinners behind. Not much seems to happen in the book except that the relationship between Mummy and Raven (to use their proper names) is momentarily threatened but endures. Otherwise, to quote from the book’s back cover blurbs, Monroe and Sam use their time to acquaint us with what life is like after the Rapture, answering the question: “What if the Religious Right is actually right? ... For the immoral majority,” the back cover continues, “life goes on pretty much as usual, except that after the Rapture, magic works — for those willing to risk demonic mutations. And an angelic army appears to have been deployed to mop up the sinners.” Life may go on pretty much as usual but various vital services and supplies are no longer readily available — electricity, for example, may be scarce; ditto milk—and living conditions are therefore reduced to ghetto squalor worldwide.

Sam’s art is deft — inked drawings with pencil shading for gray tones that impart a gloomy overcast to every page — but at the size it appears (on 160 6x9-inch pages, b/w; IDW paperback, $14.99), some detail is reduced too small for visual clarity. Monroe’s story, through which numerous unnamed characters wander without anything to do, doesn’t help: the purposeful vaguery, while ramping up the overall mysteriousness, leaves us pretty much in doubt about who these people are and why they are in the book at all.

At his website, nomediakings.org/BE.htm, Monroe explains that Therefore Repent! has no particular relation to the Left Behind series of novels, which he hasn’t read, but from what he understands, they are “sincere bible fan-fiction, careful not to violate the canon.” Monroe’s book, on the other hand, is “closer to Bible slashfic, what with the bisexual angels and nipple-clamp-enhanced demonic communion. I like to think I’m re-imagining the Bible franchise, like Frank Miller did for Batman.” Nicely conceptualized but I’m not convinced he’s succeeded.